The Applicant has developed a wide range of printers that employ pagewidth printheads instead of traditional reciprocating printhead designs. Pagewidth designs increase print speeds as the printhead does not traverse back and forth across the page to deposit a line of an image. The pagewidth printhead simply deposits the ink on the media as it moves past at high speeds. Such printheads have made it possible to perform full colour 1600 dpi printing at speeds in the vicinity of 60 pages per minute, speeds previously unattainable with conventional inkjet printers.
Printing at these speeds consumes ink quickly and this gives rise to problems with supplying the printhead with enough ink. Not only are the flow rates higher but distributing the ink along the entire length of a pagewidth printhead is more complex than feeding ink to a relatively small reciprocating printhead.
Most of the Applicants printer designs mount a series of printhead integrated circuits (ICs) to a support structure. The printhead ICs have the ink ejection nozzles formed by semiconductor fabrication techniques. The support structure has an ink distribution system with ink outlets feeding ink to the printhead ICs.
The majority of nozzles on each printhead IC are between two of the ink outlets in the support structure. The ink supply to these nozzles is via one or both of the ink feed passages. However, the end nozzles are supplied by one ink outlet only. This can slow the priming of the end regions of the nozzle array or even starve these nozzles of ink during use.